Tom Cain - No Survivors aka The Survivor

Lifting up Larsson’s boots with his left arm, Carver used his right to drag the sleeping bag over Larsson’s feet and halfway up his legs. Next he grabbed Larsson around the back and heaved him off the ground in a sort of fireman’s lift, slipping the rest of the sleeping bag under his raised backside and then, once Larsson had been lowered to the ground again, pulling it up his body. Now, at least, the sleeping bag was insulating Larsson from the chill of the shelter’s icy walls and floor. But there was still much more to be done.

It was vital to get a hot drink into Larsson’s system. Carver unpacked the gas stove, set it up, and pumped the fuel reservoir to create the pressure needed before the burner could be lit, the old-fashioned way, with a naked flame. Carver had a packet of matches, but he couldn’t hope to light them with his hands encased in thick ski gloves. He ripped off his right glove, exposing his hand to the cold. It started to shake. He tried to strike a match against the box, scrabbled feebly across the surface, overcompensated when he tried again, and snapped the end off the match, unlit.

Three more attempts followed. On each occasion, he got the match alight, only for the flame to be snuffed out by the gusts of air eddying around the snow cave.

Larsson gave another convulsive shiver.

This wasn’t going to work. They needed more shelter. Carver pulled his glove back on, crawled out of the hole, and reached out for one of the blocks of snow he’d cut from the drift. He hauled it back toward him and positioned it at the opening of the cave. It took five precious minutes to build a low wall, shin-high, across the entrance: five minutes in which Larsson’s spasms became progressively more feeble. But now, at least, there was a pocket of still air and Carver could finally ignite his stove, cram a pot full of snow, and brew up some strong tea, sweetened with sugar and condensed milk.

He poured half of it into a cup and held it to Larsson’s lips, gently pouring it into his mouth. At first, Larsson gagged, unable even to swallow. But then he relaxed and drank. A flicker of life returned to his eyes.

Carver gulped down a few mouthfuls of tea for himself. Then he opened one of the outside pockets of his backpack and pulled out a bar of Kendal mint cake, a white, creamy block of sugar, glucose, and water, flavored with mint oil. It contained virtually no protein, vitamins, essential minerals, or anything else that would please a health-conscious nutritionist. But as a means of providing an exhausted body with a shot of raw fuel, it was pretty hard to beat.

They split the bar. Larsson didn’t eat the cake so much as let it melt in his mouth and trickle down his throat. Carver took a good look at him, checking out the lower half of his face, the area that had been exposed to the wind, for any sign of white, waxy patches that would indicate frostbite.

“Looks clear,” he said. “But you could still have frostbite on the way. Is your face prickly, itchy?”

“Nuh.” Larsson shook his head. It wasn’t exactly sparkling repartee, but at least he was responding.

“I’ll get you some food,” Carver said, and went away to boil up some rice and mix hot water with the freeze-dried curry.

By the time they had eaten, darkness had fallen. Carver climbed into his own sleeping bag. Over the next few hours, he made more drinks. Larsson seemed to stabilize. The shivering subsided, and when he finally fell asleep, his breathing was shallow but reasonably even. Carver knew, though, that even though the immediate crisis had passed, the fundamental threat had not. Unless Larsson could be rescued from the mountain and given expert medical care, he had only hours to live.

Kady Jones was reading e-mails, an affectionate smile on her face. A few days ago, two of her favorite people at Los Alamos, Henry Wong and Mae Lee, had got married. They’d gone on a honeymoon to Rome and, being techies, they hadn’t sent postcards home by snail mail. They’d found an Internet café instead. Mae’s message to Kady was chatty, detailed, and intimate: one close girlfriend to another. Henry’s had consisted of a couple of lines, assuring her that Rome was pretty cool, plus a bunch of digital holiday photos, with captions attached.

His favorite was a shot of Mae posing in a park on the Aventine Hill, with a view across the Tiber to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. She looked great, her face suffused with a happiness that seemed to light up the whole shot.

“Man, am I one lucky bomb-geek!” he’d written on the caption.

Kady was looking at the shot on her lab computer, whose screen was far larger, with much better resolution than the one in the Roman café. So she noticed what Henry hadn’t, that there were two guys talking in the background of his shot, and the perspective made them look like weird midgets growing out of Mae’s armpit. Out of idle curiosity she zoomed in on them to take a closer look.

And then she gasped. “Holy shit!”

The man on the right was only vaguely recognizable, but his companion was all too familiar. If the two of them were having anything other than a casual, social conversation, this innocent holiday photograph had suddenly acquired a whole new level of significance.

She dialed a number in Washington. FBI Special Agent Tom Mulvagh, the man who’d supervised the operation at Gull Lake, had been transferred to D.C. to work on the secret team searching for the Russian bombs. They’d built up a good working relationship. She told him to expect an e-mail and waited a few seconds.

“Do you have the picture on your screen?”

“Yeah, thanks for sending me that, though e-mailing shots of hot broads is most often a guy kind of thing.”

Kady could picture Mulvagh’s grin. He liked to kid around a little when the situation allowed. She didn’t have any problem with that.

“Very funny, Tom. That ‘broad,’ as you call her, is Mae Wong, the beautiful, sensitive, and highly intelligent wife of my associate Henry Wong. And she’s not what I want you to look at. Go in on the two guys…”

“What, the ones in her armpit?”

“Exactly… Recognize them?”

There was silence on the line while Mulvagh thought, then: “The one on the right looks familiar.”

“That’s what I thought,” agreed Kady. “I’m pretty sure I saw his picture in a magazine. He’s that general. His assistant got killed in the park in D.C.”

“Vermulen,” said Mulvagh. “Right, I remember. But what’s the significance to you or me?”

“Well, it’s not him that caught my attention. It’s the other one, with the darker hair. He’s Dr. Francesco Riva. He’s Italian, came over here in the late seventies, got a masters at MIT, and worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for more than a decade. That’s where I got to know him, and you can take it from me, Mulvagh, Frankie Riva is really a fantastic nuclear physicist.”

“And I should care about this because…?”

“Because, for one, Frankie’s specialty was the miniaturization of nuclear weapons; and for two, he quit the lab five years ago and disappeared right off the map. You’ve got to understand, pretty much everyone in our business knows everyone else, by reputation or in person. We know who’s doing what, and where. But for the last few years, Frankie Riva hasn’t been doing anything. Not in public, anyway.”

“And now you’re going to tell me what he’s been doing in private.” said Mulvagh.

“Well, I don’t know. Not for sure. But the thing about him was he didn’t live like a nerd. He wasn’t at home with his PC and his pizza boxes. He liked European sports cars, pretty girls, and dinners for two at the kind of place where the maître d’ had to translate the menu.”